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Industry | Video games |
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Founded | 1980 |
Headquarters | , US |
Key people | Bill Hogue Jeff Konyu |
Products | Miner 2049er Bounty Bob Strikes Back! |
Website | bigfivesoftware.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 14 September 2019) |
Big Five Software was an American video game developer and publisher in the first half of the 1980s founded by Bill Hogue and Jeff Konyu. [1] [2] The company developed games for the TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit computers. Most of its TRS-80 games were clones of arcade video games, such as Galaxy Invasion ( Galaxian ), Super Nova ( Asteroids ), Defense Command ( Missile Command ), and Meteor Mission II ( Lunar Rescue ). [3] Big Five also sold an Atari joystick interface called TRISSTICK which was popular with TRS-80 owners. [4]
The company's biggest release came after moving away from the black and white TRS-80. The ten stage platform game Miner 2049er , designed and programmed by Bill Hogue for Atari 8-bit computers, [5] was a commercial and critical success. It shipped on a custom 16 kilobyte ROM cartridge (compared to standard 8 KB Atari 8-bit cartridges) and the game was ported to other computers and consoles. Miner 2049er was awarded "Electronic Game of the Year" in the 1984 Arkie Awards, [6] among other accolades for the game and Hogue.
A planned sequel, Scraper Caper, was advertised, but cancelled. A sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back! was published in 1985 after which Hogue stopped developing games and Big Five ramped down. In 2001, [a] he released a free, custom emulation of the Atari 8-bit versions of Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back! for Microsoft Windows. [8]